Virtual Houston

By Fabian Buentello | Jul 17, 2017

Houston is known for many things– we’re the fourth largest city in the US, we’ve got the largest medical center in the world, NASA, the Energy Corridor. But one thing Houston is not known for is being a tech hub. That’s about to change…

ChaiOne has joined The Mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, in the initiative to make “Space City” the next tech hub. With “Start Houston” and “Station Houston” joining as one, the time has never been more appropriate.

To really kick off ChaiOne’s involvement in making Houston a tech giant, we decided to take advantage of Apple’s new Augmented Reality tool, ARKit, which will be released as part of iOS 11, to explore downtown Houston from the comfort of our office. (You can find the video below). Though AR has been around for a while, from the day it was coined at Boeing to Google Glass to our beloved SnapChat Filters, what makes Apple’s ARKit different from previous attempts is that Apple will have control of both the software and hardware– this will give users an AR experience like never before. A map is a perfect example. In most cases when interacting with a map, you do so on a 2D plane, whether on a piece of paper or on a screen. Now you can travel around the world not by a drag of a finger or mouse, but by physically moving within the map.

The possibilities are endless. Just as we as a society didn’t understand the “Apps on a smart phone” when they were released, we have yet to discover how big of an impact AR will be on our lives. As I like to say, “AR allows users to interact with applications in a new dimension.”